The origin of the melon, however, appears very uncertain. Far from being indigenous in Italy, it was asserted by the Roman naturalists to have been brought from Africa by Metellus; while others believe it to have been derived from their earlier Asiatic conquests. Scipio is said by some to have first introduced it into Rome. From whatever source derived, the gardeners of Greece and Rome made the culture of the melon a subject of especial study. Pliny spoke of the delicacy and flavour of the fruit as well as of its indigestibility. It may be observed, however, that in the more ancient bas-reliefs and frescoes of fruit found in Herculaneum, the melon does not appear.
The modern arts of horticulture have added innumerable varieties of the melon to the round and oblong species known to the Romans; and Godoy, the Prince of Peace, devoted himself in Spain to the improvement of this favourite fruit. It is a mistake, however, to suppose that the fine kind called the Cantalupe, reached us from that country; the name being derived from the village of Cantalupi near Rome, famous for the cultivation of its melons. In Spain and France, the melon is eaten with roast meat, at dinner; in England and Russia, it is eaten with sugar at dessert. By many people the crudeness is qualified with pepper and ginger; but the Bavarian mother of the Regent, Duke of Orleans, provoked much criticism in Paris by powdering her slice of melon with Spanish snuff, according to the custom in some parts of Germany.
A strange object of luxury in the same country consists in snails. A large white species of snail, much cultivated at Ulm, is sent to various parts of Germany. One of the popular errors concerning these snails, is the opinion that when decapitated the body will produce a new head. Spallanzani and Voltaire tried the experiment on innumerable snails, and attest that a head was really reproduced. It is well known that the body of a fly will exist some time after being deprived of its head; and that, on crushing the shell of a snail, the creature is able to repair, by degrees, its shattered dwelling. But in spite of the authority of Spallanzani and Voltaire, we have no faith in the power of reproduction of a second head. Valmont de Bomare, after decapitating fifteen hundred, decided that the opinion was erroneous; and, unwilling to suppose that two such great authorities had imposed on public credulity, concludes that in their reluctance to the task, they merely cut off the nose and ears of the sensitive snails without effecting a positive decapitation. A fact untrue of the snail, however, has been proved as regards several varieties of polypi, which are able to reproduce themselves from fragments of a dismembered polypus. There is one species of polypus susceptible of being completely turned inside out, like a glove, without injury to the vital power!
Turenne, who wrote a Treatise on the nature of snails, may be called the Attila of the species, since he admits having decapitated thousands and thousands. He even affects compunction on the subject, after the example of the Greek physician, Herophilus, who dissected seven hundred bodies in illustration of his anatomical lectures in the theatre of Alexandria. Turenne asserts that, if Valmont de Bomare and Adanson found no renovation of head in the snails they decapitated, it was because they failed to supply their victims with the food which snails are organized to imbibe through the pores of their bodies by crawling over vegetable matter, even when deprived of their heads. He declares that a period of two years is indispensable for the reproduction of a head.
The discoveries of modern navigators have unquestionably added to our menageries a vast variety of animals unknown to the ancients, or known only by hearsay, and esteemed apocryphal. But, on the other hand, various animals with which the ancients pretended to be familiar have wholly disappeared; such as sphinxes and griffins, the phœnix, the salamander, the unicorn, besides many-headed serpents and dragons, which we now abandon to the emblazonment of heraldry.
The most famous dragons of antiquity were those which drew through the air the car of Medea. The philosophic Possidonius—who made war so valiantly against the gout, which he maintains to be no evil—speaks of a dragon which covered an acre of ground; and could swallow a knight on horseback with as much ease as the whale did Jonas. This was, however, an insignificant reptile compared with the one discovered in India by St. Maximus, Archbishop of Tyre, which covered five acres of ground.
Both in sacred and profane history, dragons have honourable mention. Cadmus is related to have destroyed a dragon; the garden of the Hesperides was guarded by a dragon; St. George triumphed over a dragon; and the Dragon of Wantley has become proverbial in English song. St. Augustin, Bishop of Hippona, speaks with authority of the existence of dragons; describing them as winged serpents which conceal themselves in caverns during the day-time, though they occasionally venture forth and rise into the air. From this it was inferred, by early naturalists, that the dragon of the ancients was one of the larger serpent tribes, having a cartilaginous substance similar to the wings of the bat, or flying-fish, attached to its body.
Suetonius declares that the Emperor Tiberius possessed a pet dragon, which was completely tame and used to eat out of his hand; probably an iguano, the sort of lizard which forms a luxurious object of food in the West Indies; and which, though perfectly harmless, has a frightful appearance. Crinitus records that, in the time of the Emperor Maurice, there was an inundation of the Tiber, which left behind it, on the land, an enormous dragon. The same writer mentions that the Emperor Augustus kept a prodigious dragon in his palace, which he used to lead about with a string. A constellation serves to attest the existence of the dragon of Lernia.
The tame dragon of the imperial palace was probably a tame boa-constrictor similar to the one formerly kept in the library of the late Sir Joseph Banks.
Various are the records in ancient authors of prodigious serpents. Pliny declares that, in Africa, the army of Regulus was kept in check by an enormous serpent; a statement confirmed by Aulus Gellius and other historians, and admitted by Rollin and Bossuet in their Histoire universelle, and Histoire ancienne. Follard refutes it in his Commentary on Polybius; conceiving the fact of a serpent of one hundred and twenty feet keeping at bay a large army and its engines of war to be an insult to the prowess of the Roman warriors. The following is the opinion the celebrated Lacépède on this subject.